American Literary Studies

Nathaniel Tarn Papers

The Papers

The Nathaniel Tarn Papers include manuscripts of his published and unpublished
poetry and prose, notebooks from his anthropological fieldwork, and correspondence
with his personal friends, literary colleagues, and fellow anthropologists.
Also included is a complete set of his publications, in book as well as
in periodical form.

Location of the Collection: Department of Special Collections,
Green Library

Call Number: M1132

Size: approximately 100 linear feet

Finding Guide: A printed version is available in the reading room of
the Department of Special Collections. Electronic versions of this finding
guide are also available. If you have Microsoft's Internet Explorer version
6.0 or higher, click here to connect to the XML version on the Stanford server;
if not, click here for the html version on the Online Archives of California
server.

Click the links below for a less detailed list compiled by Tarn himself:

Research Access and Use: Materials in the Department of Special Collections
are non-circulating and must be used in the Special Collections' Reading Room
in the Cecil H. Green Library. The Reading Room is open 10:00am to 5:00pm Monday
through Friday. Photocopies, photographs, and microfilm can be made of some
materials in the collections. For more information about the collections and
access policies, please contact Special Collections by telephone at (650) 725-1022,
by electronic mail at speccollref@stanford.edu or
by regular mail at the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University
Libraries, Stanford, California
94305-6004.

Career of Nathaniel Tarn (1928 - )

Nathaniel Tarn was born in Paris,1928, lived there until age 7, then in Belgium (Lycée d’Anvers) until age 11. He was educated at Clifton College, U.K. then at King’s College, Cambridge where he studied History and English. He returned to Paris and, after some journalism and radio work, discovered anthropology, taking courses with Marcel Griaule, Claude Lévi-Strauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, Paul Lévy and others at the Musée de l’Homme, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France. A Fulbright grant took him to Yale and the University of Chicago where he worked with Fred Eggan, Sol Tax and Robert. The latter sent him to Guatemala for his doctoral fieldwork (1951-2). He completed this work as a graduate student at the London School of Economics under Raymond Firth, Fred Nadel, Isaac Schapera and others (1953-8). In 1958, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation/Royal Institute of International Affairs sent him to Burma for 18 months after which he became Lecturer in South East Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1960-1967).

Tarn published his first volume of poetry Old Savage/Young City with Jonathan Cape, London in 1964 and a translation of Neruda’s “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” in 1986 and began building a new poetry program at Cape. From 1967-9, he joined Cape as General Editor of the international series Cape Editions and a Founding Director of Cape-Goliard Press, specializing in contemporary American Poetry with emphasis on Olson, Duncan, Zukofsky and their peers and successors. He brought a great many French, other European and Latin American titles to Cape and made many visits to the U.S. as a Cape Editor. He taught English at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo in 1969.

In 1970, with a foremost interest in the American literary scene, he immigrated to the U.S. as Visiting Professor of Romance Languages, Princeton University and eventually became a citizen. Since then he taught English and American Literature, Epic Poetry, Folklore etc. etc. at inter alia the Universities of Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, Manchuria (PRC), reading and lecturing all over he world: Paris, Heidelberg, Freiburg, Berlin, Rome, Messina, Prague, Budapest, Sydney, Melbourne, etc. etc. He has set foot in every state of the Union, with especially long study in Alaska. Extensive travels over the years in Cuba, Mexico, Central America, Peru, most of Europe and Russia, Southern Africa, India, China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia & Sarawak, the Himalayas, Oceania, Australia and Antarctica have informed his poetry from the start.

As poet, literary & cultural critic (two volumes: “Views from the Weaving Mountain” and “The Embattled Lyric”), translator (he was the first to render Segalen’s “Stèles” into English, continued work on Neruda, Latin American and French poets) and editor (with many magazines), Tarn has published some thirty books and booklets in his various disciplines. He has been translated into some ten foreign languages. His poetry possesses a remarkable range of voice and reference, fusing archaic myth with contemporary concerns and moving from complex hieratic visions to the deeply personal.

In 1985, he took early retirement as Professor Emeritus of Poetry, Comparative Literature and Anthropology from Rutgers University and has since lived some twenty minutes N.W of Santa Fe, New Mexico. His interests range from bird watching, gardening, classical music, opera & ballet, stamp collecting, etc. all the way over to aviation and world history.

Shamoon Zamir: "Scandals in the House of Anthropology: notes towards a
reading of Nathaniel Tarn" in Cross Cultural Poetics,
no.5, Minneapolis, MN, 1999, pp.99-122. A version of this is in
the Internet Magazine, Jacket, no.6, Sydney, Australia, 1999